- The Itombwe nightjar is a bird described from a single specimen in the Congo Basin nearly 70 years ago and not seen by science for at least the past decade.
- It’s in the top 10 of the global Search for Lost Birds, an initiative by a group of international conservation NGOs.
- Complicating its search is the fact that the region where the type specimen was collected is currently a conflict zone in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
- But there’s hope for the species: it may be far more widely distributed, with live sightings and recordings of its song made at the other end of the Congo Basin, in Cameroon and the Republic of Congo.
A rare bird known only from a single specimen captured in the eastern Congo Basin nearly 70 years ago has become one of the most sought-after species in the global Search for Lost Birds initiative.
Scientists first described the Itombwe nightjar, also known as Prigogine’s nightjar (Caprimulgus prigoginei), from a female specimen captured in 1955 in the Itombwe Massif, a vast forested mountain range in what is today South Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The bird is among the top 10 of 126 lost birds worldwide that are being sought by the initiative from the American Bird Conservancy, BirdLife International and Re:wild. Inclusion on the list means none of the 126 birds has been documented by science for at least the last 10 years.
“Our specific interest in highlighting the Itombwe nightjar in the top 10 is that it is a really enigmatic species,” says John Mittermeier, the initiative’s director.
Armed conflict between rebel groups in the eastern DRC has made most Western scientists reluctant to venture into South Kivu. Not so Papy Dunia, an ornithologist with strong links to local communities, who has trained in Belgium to capture, handle and research nightjars.
Now, he’s using those skills to track down the Itombwe nightjar.
In April, Dunia trekked for a week, by motorbike and on foot, to reach the Itombwe field sites, where he set up autonomous recording units (ARUs) — essentially audio recorders — that he’ll retrieve later this year.
“It was pretty wet when he was there, but the ARUs should run into September at set intervals and he’ll collect them later when the weather patterns are more conducive to mist netting, when he will try mist netting at dusk to catch nightjars,” Mittermeier says.
Mist nets are a fine-meshed net strung up between poles that allow researchers to capture birds so they can be photographed and measured before being released unharmed. If the effort is successful, the information they collect should also help Dunia and colleagues Ruben Evens and Michiel Lathouwers of Antwerp University in Belgium to clear up the mystery of the Itombwe nightjar.
Some researchers contend that the Itombwe nightjar, listed as endangered, has a much wider distribution than currently believed.
In April 1996, ornithologist Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire heard the call of the nightjar in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, more than 1,500 kilometers (950 miles) northwest of DRC’s Itombwe.
In a 2009 paper, she recalls having heard the same call two years earlier, 240 km (150 mi) to the southwest, in Odzala National Park. This time, she glimpsed the nightjar and its mate flitting around in thick vegetation in the semidarkness. She was able to discern a small, stocky bird without any noticeable pale patches on its wings or tail.
That same month, primatologist Tom Butynski made a sound recording of the nightjar in Itombwe, and saw two of the birds flying back and forth along a forest path.
Dowsett-Lemaire and her husband returned to the same site in Nouabalé-Ndoki the following year to try to capture the birds in a mist net. They failed, but subsequently heard the same nightjar calls in southeastern Cameroon, in Lobéké National Park, and again in the Nki Forest Reserve.
“Comparisons of the tapes from Itombwe and [those from the Republic of Congo] show beyond doubt that we are dealing with the same nightjar,” Dowsett-Lemaire wrote.
Even if the Itombwe nightjar’s range does extend across at least three countries spanning the breadth of the Congo Basin, what’s not in question are the human impacts on the forests of Itombwe.
Though most of Itombwe’s forests remain intact across its 15,000 square kilometers (5,800 square miles), the wildlife within them has been heavily impacted by hunting, according to experts from the international Key Biodiversity Areas (KBA) Programme, which maps and assesses the planet’s most critical sites for nature conservation.
“When we went in at the edge (of Itombwe) in 2014 there was evidence of people hunting birds with homemade mist nets and traps targeting turacos and owls because many of the large mammals had gone,” Andy Plumptre, head of the KBA Secretariat, told Mongabay.
Itombwe gets its KBA status from 37 “trigger species” that include the Itombwe nightjar; the Congo bay-owl (Phodilus prigoginei), another “lost” species not documented since 1996, and critically endangered eastern gorillas (Gorilla beringei).
Bertin Murhabale, an ornithologist and ecologist at the DRC’s Official University of Bukavu, has witnessed both the diversity of species and the damage. Between 2016 and 2018, Murhabale surveyed the Burhinyi Forest, in the northern section of the Itombwe Mountains, and discovered that 126 species lived there, including most of the birds unique to East Africa’s vast Albertine Rift ecoregion.
But Murhabale and his team also saw the impact that shifting agriculture was having on critical ecosystems. Locals had cleared and burned high-altitude mixed bamboo forests, home to the Rockefeller’s sunbird (Cinnyris rockefelleri), another species found only in the eastern DRC, to make way for crops. Poverty, worsened by armed conflict, made locals dependent on this agricultural practice, Murhabale wrote at the time.
A biodiversity conservation plan in Burhinyi, and elsewhere in Itombwe, involves traditional chiefs and local leaders setting aside parts of the forest for community-based biodiversity conservation.
Much remains to be done, Murhabale tells Mongabay, but “if the lost birds are rediscovered, they have a chance of surviving.”
Support for local researchers, like Dunia, could also prove key to promoting conservation.
“If the people rediscovering [lost birds] are also the ones who are well-situated to do the conservation,” Mittermeier says, “that’s often the best approach for long-term success.”
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CORRECTION: On Sep. 13, 2024, this article was amended to clarify that Tom Butynski saw the birds he recorded in Itombwe in April 1996, and Françine Dowsett-Lemaire first heard the nightjar in April ’94, and then again at two sites in Cameroon in late ’97 and early ’98. We have also corrected an error misplacing Odzala National Park — it is, of course, in the Republic of Congo.
Banner Image: A Madagascar nightjar (Caprimulgus madagascariensis), which shares a genus with the endangered Itombwe nightjar (Caprimulgus prigoginei). Image by Francesco Veronesi via wikimedia commons (CC BY ND 2.0)
Citations:
Rutt, C. L., Miller, E. T., Berryman, A. J., Safford, R. J., Biggs, C., & Mittermeier, J. C. (2024). Global gaps in citizen‐science data reveal the world’s “lost” birds. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, e2778. doi:10.1002/fee.2778
Dowsett-Lemaire, F. (2009). The song of presumed Prigogine’s Nightjar Caprimulgus prigoginei and its possible occurrence in Lower Guinea. Bulletin of the African Bird Club, 16(2), 174-179. doi:10.5962/p.309878
Murhabale, B. C., Bwanamudogo, I., Magadju, A., Tolbert, S., Bapeamoni, F., Kahindo, C., … Agenong’a, U. (2021). Birds of Burhinyi mountain forest, North of Itombwe Nature Reserve, Democratic Republic of Congo. African Journal of Ecology, 59(1), 305-311. doi:10.1111/aje.12825
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